David Prutton can remember the laughter. Back in the 2000s and 2010s, when the Premier League midfielder was in his prime, he admits some of his colleagues did not take match warm-ups entirely seriously.
“The more you look back on it, the more you realise that some of it was bafflingly not understood,” Prutton tells The Athletic. “There would be some lads not putting it in for the warm-up because they were ‘saving it for the game’.
“My take on it was that you’ve got to be blowing and sweating because I was never good enough just to turn it on when the first whistle went.
“I remember a manager saying, in front of us players, that he thought warm-ups were ‘b*******’. That was something a lot of fitness coaches had to contend with. They were all highly educated — they’d all spent thousands of pounds on education just to come and work at a football club where sometimes they’d be dismissed out of hand.
“Sometimes, at one of my clubs, we’d be doing a warm-up session where you’d be looking at half an hour, tops, but after 20 minutes, the manager at the time would be like, ‘F*** it, that’s enough, get over here’, and obviously all the lads were laughing along.
“But I look back now and think that was unprofessional. You’d turn around and look at your crestfallen colleague or mate, the fitness coach, and I have vivid memories of him just chuntering to himself.”
Aston Villa’s players go through their pre-match warm-up at Brighton (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)
Nowadays, things are generally different. At the highest level of football, preparation is meticulous and warm-ups are part of the daily routine, with those who run them before matches and training sessions enjoying a new level of respect.
The days of players going through the motions have largely gone. Callum Walsh, a former head of sports science at Newcastle United who works at Porto in Portugal, says supporters only see around half of what players actually do before a game.
“A game warm-up is split into two parts,” Walsh tells The Athletic. “There is the stuff they do inside, which you don’t see, and then the stuff they do outside on the pitch.
“I’d say 99 per cent of players do between 15 minutes and half an hour in the gym before they even step on the pitch. Often it’s their own routine. They might have a chronic Achilles tendon problem, for example, so they know they need to prepare before they even go on the pitch.
“Then, when they go on the pitch, the aim is to effectively prepare them for the game ahead and that means preparing them physically, technically, tactically and also mentally.”
Perth Glory’s Charli Wainwright stretches before an A-League Women match (James Worsfold/Getty Images)
For most match-going supporters, the warm-up is an event that happens in the background as they are filing into the stadium, queuing for refreshments, drinking in the concourse or chatting to friends.
Television viewers might catch a glimpse of it over the shoulders of pundits or when directors show cutaways of individual players during pre-match analysis.
But for the people in charge, it is a scientific process designed to give their team the best preparation for the contest ahead.
Methods vary but according to Walsh, most coaches stick loosely to the RAMP principle, a term coined by the internationally renowned sports scientist Ian Jeffreys, whom Walsh describes as one of the “founding fathers” of the field.
“RAMP stands for raise — which relates to the heart rate — activate, mobilise and potentiate, which relate to muscles,” he says. “Most warm-ups will have that in there, maybe in slightly different orders.
“For example, sometimes guys will give players a minute or two free. Sometimes they’ll be straight into the dynamics. Sometimes they’ll touch the ball lightly, and then it will usually go into mobilisation.
“That’s generic, going through the groups of muscles that are usually quite common, so it will be abductors, hamstrings, quads, calves, glutes. That’s the main body of work, mobility-wise.
“Then it’s on to ‘activate’, and there’s lots of different forms of that. Some teams do it in a circle. Liverpool always used to do it in a circle. I always do it in lines but it’s basically all the same, just in a different layout.
“It’s about making sure muscles are ready to go. Then ‘potentiate’ is about trying to fire up more muscle fibres than they’ll need, so you might sometimes see players sprinting or even wrestling with each other.”
Lille’s players warm up at Marseille’s Stade Velodrome (Pascal Pochard-Casabianca/AFP via Getty Images)
For Prutton, the warm-up was always a vital part of matchday, even if his team-mates did not universally take it quite as seriously.
“Given the type of player I was, which was wanting to get around the pitch as much as possible and being athletic, particularly early on in my career, I saw it as a huge part of the job,” he said.
“It was as much mental as it was physical in the sense of getting you into that mode of jogging out, having the first feel for the fans, what mood they were in, daft things like the weather, how warm it is, how cold it is, what potentially you should be wearing from a footwear point of view.
“I really saw it as part and parcel of what the whole day was.
“As you get a bit older, you get a bit stiffer and it takes a bit longer to warm up. In the generation that I grew up in, it was undoubtedly a huge part of what the match day rituals and routine was.”
Dominic Calvert-Lewin stretches before Leeds United face Nottingham Forest (George Wood/Getty Images)
In modern times, warm-ups extend beyond matchdays. According to Walsh, preparing players’ bodies for training sessions is equally if not more important, especially on days when coaches’ requirements place a particular strain on a specific muscle group.
“They’ll have half an hour to 45 minutes in the gym before they even set foot on the grass,” Walsh says. “That can be doing their individual work, so they’ll all have individual programs and then they do the generic work.
“Then they go out onto the pitch to do the warm-up, and that can either be linked to their injury history, or it can be linked to what the session’s going to be about. So if the session has certain requirements in the day, you’ll do certain things to prepare the body for that.
“That might be high-speed running, it might be because it’s more focused on accelerations and decelerations. Depending on what the coach or the session is that day, you can work backwards from that, and do that both in the gym, in the movement, and then on the pitch.”
On matchdays, Walsh opts for familiarity throughout a season, ensuring players who are preparing themselves mentally for a game ahead can slip into a regular routine.
“Players like their routines, especially if things are going well, they don’t want anything changed,” he says. “So for me, the pattern is always exactly the same; the pitch layout is exactly the same.
“Everything is on autopilot, even the rhythm, going from the far side to near side to middle, so they’re always in that flow, so there’s no disconnection.”
Crystal Palace’s players are put through their paces pre-match at Selhurst Park (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
Before training, however, Walsh’s approach is the opposite as he attempts to keep things fresh, stimulate players’ minds and tap into their individual needs and moods. Away from matchdays, variety is the spice of life. But he believes brevity is equally important.
“Some guys will take 8-10 minutes, other guys will take 30-35 minutes, just for the warm-up,” he explains. “My argument is that if you’re doing a half-hour warm-up on top of the hour’s training, you start to add a lot of load onto the guys when we’re really conscious of the load that we’re putting on them with the game schedule.
“It will follow similar principles — raise, activate, mobilise, potentiate.
“But some days it’ll have different themes. Some days, you want to open with some high-speed running. Other days, you might want to wake them up a little bit mentally if they’ve had a day or two off, so you’d maybe do something more reactionary. On matchday minus one, maybe do something funny, maybe do something more competitive.
“I don’t think the lads are always the biggest fans of doing the warm-ups every day anyway, but if you just do the same warm-up every day, they’re going to lynch you.
“So maybe the format changes, the way you do it changes, the layout changes. Maybe you add music, or take music away.
“There are millions of different formats of doing basically the same thing with a different feel, and then you do specifics of each day.”
Ben White, Harry Maguire and England jog in the drizzle at St George’s Park (Carl Recine/Getty Images)
There are other variables to consider. Some coaches ask goalkeepers to join in to bond them with the team, while others leave them to prepare separately. Some involve substitutes in the whole warm-up, but others exclude them entirely. Both, says Walsh, are matters of personal preference.
Some head coaches take an active role in planning warm-ups. Others are happy to delegate them entirely.
And some, as Prutton observed, view them with disdain — although their number appears to be dwindling.
Then, of course, things can go wrong. Every club at some stage will have lost a player to injury in the warm-up.
“That can happen for a few reasons,” adds Walsh. “Maybe they were potentially a question mark before the game because of an injury. Sometimes it’s a general fatigue with the number of games that these guys are playing now. Sometimes it just happens.
“It might just be someone’s overreach, or the day is super-cold. Sometimes they’re starting to come down a little bit ill.
“It’s really not great, but unfortunately, once or twice a season it can happen and it is our worst nightmare when it does. But a warm-up isn’t so intense that you’re always on edge. It’s not like when you’re doing some tough pre-season sessions and you’re praying and thinking: ‘I hope everyone gets through it’.
“A warm-up is something that happens most days. On a matchday, it’s a little bit more intense than a normal one, but it’s not hard.”